


Worst Aid

by DesdemonaKaylose



Category: Phineas and Ferb
Genre: M/M, evil college au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-27
Updated: 2015-02-15
Packaged: 2018-03-03 18:29:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,897
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2861441
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesdemonaKaylose/pseuds/DesdemonaKaylose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Contributions in the evil college AU:</p><p>Evil college is actually more like grad school. Most of the professors are retired villains with an impressive resume of practical evil behind them, but Doctor Doofenshmirtz has never actually been a full scale villain—he took a couple years away from academia with a part time nemesis while he was raising his daughter, but after the divorce he contracted out and picked up the teaching position.</p><p>Agent P, once again without a proper nemesis, has been shuffled into an infiltration program. Target? The College of Evil.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Monologuing

   
It's a slow day for emails, so Heinz is grading papers when the door finally opens.

Perry drops in during office hours like he always does (“always”, Heinz takes a little starburst of pleasure in thinking, even though it’s really only been a month), while Heinz is squinting at some essays and trying to figure out if this is a typo or just a very unfortunate choice of words. This particular error is less embarrassing than the one from the kid with the wonky space bar who was trying to write about “the penis mightier than the sword”. Unfortunately, it's also taking longer to decipher.

Perry doesn’t say anything—big shocker—but Heinz has figured out exactly what particular sound of the door slipping open accompanies Perry's entrances. During regular hours he throws doors around like they’re javelins and he’s an Olympic sportsman, but you catch him by himself and he’s a--he’s like a ninja, it’s really something else. The competitive theft team is probably tripping over themselves trying to recruit him. Heinz feels like he ought to be encouraging the kid—he’s not really a kid, of course, but everybody feels like a kid to a recent divorcee—to pursue glamorous extracurriculars and forge lifelong bonds with upcoming master criminals. Perry is only a month or so into his first semester and he's already dazzling the powers that be; he's a rockstar, he's submitting a paper for a conference on Double Crossing if the word in the department is to be believed.

Perry came to the college a nobody, no shtick no backstory no legacy, with just an admission project on Nemesis Ethics that the board had decided to take a chance on. They'd been impressed enough to slap a stamp on that transfer acceptance, but Heinz had seen it himself after the curiosity got bad enough to do some snooping. It was prosaic. It had no heart. Well, you might expect that from the junior super villains--after all, would he read a romance novel by some dowdy spinster aunt? Of course not! So he'd looked over the dry but competent paper, given his new student a good hard look, and said _eh, good enough for a novice._ Doctor Doofenshmirtz is, admittedly, a bit on the other extreme of the scale. A bit of a romantic himself. And he knows what it's like to skate in just as the spiked gate comes crashing down, metaphorically speaking. Normally they wouldn’t give a professorship to a guy with no practical evil experience, but he knows that someone on the committee took a look at the tragic backstory section of his resume and decided to give him a chance. He doesn't know who it was. They told him this in a poorly lit parking garage at eleven o'clock at night while he was trying to get his keys out of his stupid pockets and there was a lot of _jingling_ , and whoever it was had this pointless raspy fake voice like, why did you even bother, it's not like I can understand half of this?

He's lost himself a bit in the mental ramble, there. He blinks, watching Perry close the door softly behind himself. Rockstar, yes. that was where he was going. As Perry's mentor--he's certain that's what he is, he must be--it's really his duty to help strengthen those connections, encourage academic excellence and general rockstarhood of the surprise talent in their midst. But.

Eh, call him greedy, he doesn’t really want to risk it.

"Ah," he says, over the second sheet of this woefully short essay, "Perry Platz, how nice of you to join me."

It was only about a week ago that he stopped saying “ _how unexpected_ ”, after he finally looked around his own office and noticed the kid had dragged in a desk for himself from one of the classrooms down the hall. It was wedged between the bookshelf and the wall.

"Did you find the one about regulatory accords?" Heinz asks. He drops the essay, he’ll get back to it later when his life returns to the usual swirling void of insecurity and nothingness he’s grown accustomed to. That makes grading feel like a walk in the park by comparison.

Perry grins and digs out something dusty and red vinyl-bound, spinning it around so Heinz can see the cover. It looks deadly boring, but Perry’s got more patience in his admittedly small body than Heinz has ever had in the accumulation of his entire life. He whistles.

"That’s gonna be a read," he observes.

Perry shrugs. He doesn’t seem worried about it. Perry rarely seems worried about anything academic, but Heinz is all too aware that this is only Perry's first semester of course work.

"You know," Heinz says (for like the fourth time, _okay,_ he’s not worried), "you don’t have to do your project on this exaaaactly. This is pretty research intensive, maybe you should wait a semester or two—"

Perry waves him off.

Heinz thinks that one of the things he’s most interested in, when it comes to Perry, is how the guy just… doesn’t talk. They’re two of a kind in a strange way. Like a left and right hand. He tries not to get too anxious about Perry eventually going professional, about the monologuing—

"You’re in Calamitous Evil," he says, squinting at Perry, "have you already got your monologuing credits?"

Perry blinks at him, seems to take a second to catch up, and then slowly shakes his head. It doesn’t seem very sure of itself, that head shake.

"No?"

Another shake of the head, but this time more certain, and that’s kind of weird? Is it weird? Heinz isn’t sure. Something about that feels kind of— oh, well, anyways.

"You’ve gotta get that," he says, now a little preoccupied with his internal dithering. "I mean, if you wanna stay in the program. I’m surprised they let you start without it."

Perry waves him off again.

"No no," Heinz says, "I’m serious, are you putting any thought into this?"

Perry shrugs.

Heinz frowns. “Look, I,” he starts, reshuffling his papers, “I want you to do well. You picked me, right? I mean it’s not like you’re the only student who’s ever shown any interest ooobviously I have loads of super interested students in and out of here all the time I’m not lonely or anything—”

Perry is just kind of looking at him with his brows raised. Heinz clamps down his jaw on whatever else was about to roll out of his mouth and accidentally takes a chunk of flesh out of his lip and OUCH goshdiddlydangit that hurts.

Perry jumps out of his chair whip cracking-fast and leans over the desk, grabs Heinz by the jaw.

"It’s okay," the professor manages, eyes watering like crazy, "I just bit mmmmmmmyouch. Jeeze that hurts."

Perry narrows his eyes—he has beautiful eyes, it’s a scientific fact—and carefully places his thumb on Heinz’s lower lip. He has large hands, but they move with an unexpected delicacy. Perry presses down until the wet soft inner skin is exposed. That hurts, but Heinz is so distracted now that he hardly notices.

"Um," he mumbles into the roundness of Perry’s thumb.

Perry gives the faintly bleeding injury a methodical once over and seems, pretty quickly, satisfied that nothing heinous has happened here.

His hand doesn’t move.

Has Heinz mentioned his eyes yet? They’re very brown, and very expressive, and right now they are very, very close. Heinz swallows, nervously.

Perry leans in with a deliberate sort of slowness, as if he’s wary of being stopped, and brushes his own dry lips onto the aching skin just above Heinz’s tiny stupid injury. It’s barely a flutter of contact, a sigh rather than a shout, and then Perry pulls back and releases his hold on the other man’s mouth.

Heinz licks his lips. It hurts, and it’s kind of amazing.

"Soooo I guess you haven’t taken any first aid courses either," he finally says.

Smooth Heinz. Totally smooth.


	2. Introductions

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> well this is completely out of order

Professor Heinz Doofenshmirtz looked over his email, squinting at the signature attached to the end. This kid must be a big deal for the president of the college to get involved. Of course mid-semester transfer was unusual enough that maybe it was necessary. He shrugged and returned his attention to the stocky student waiting silently beside the podium.

Well,” Heinz said, “they could have at least given me some _forewarning_. I mean jeeze, I’ve got a syllabus to keep up with and all.”

The student—Perry Platz, according to the belated email—blinked politely. Heinz gave up grumbling for now. Ranting on class time was a waste of potentially useful vengeful energy he could funnel back into staff politics are the next department meeting. He gestured towards the rest of the class, where a student popped a bubble of unimpressed chewing gum.

“Alright,” he said, “introduce yourself and sit down.”

Perry turned to the class, eyes narrowed at some internal calculation. He gave Heinz a brief, uncertain look.

“Your name,” Heinz suggested, taking pity on the new guy. Everyone has been the new guy at some point, and disastrously so in his own case. You don’t forget. “Maybe a hobby?”

Perry bit his lip for a moment and then, like a bulb blinking on, whirled to the white board. He flicked the cap off a blue marker and slapped his name across the surface with precise letters, below which he scrawled a complex algebraic equation and solved the thing in the same movement. It wasn’t anything particularly advance, but the satisfied directness with which he marked off the final X struck Heinz in a peculiar way. A spotlight seemed to shine on Perry, a stage opening up around him. When he had walked in the door he had been like a stagehand, forgettable and uninterested.

Heinz considered the board for a minute. It really _wasn’t_ a terribly complex problem. A math genius would have tried something showier, and a tech student would have put up something more practically oriented. This was just algebra—straightforward, predictable, and designed to be solved.

“You like to solve problems?” Heinz said, at last.

Perry lit up in a startled smile, the expression a little puzzled. Maybe he hadn’t expected anyone to grasp the meaning so quickly. Why’d he put it up if he didn’t expect anyone to get it?

Secretive guy, Heinz guessed. Not really overlord material, but maybe a budding mastermind.

“Well that’s an… unusual specialty,” Heinz admitted, “for an evil college.”

For the first time, Perry looked nervous.

Heinz waved a hand. “Hey, hey, I’m not saying it’s not workable. Look, hang back after class, we’ll talk.”

Maybe he was jumping the gun here—after all, it was only the kid’s first day, career counseling from a stranger might be a little bit _much._ But Heinz had been throwing himself at people all his life and he had an instinct telling him to throw himself at this one, now, before he slipped free again. Heinz was vaguely aware that he came on strong. He was not actually sure why this tended to work in his disfavor.

But Perry, after a second of consideration, only nodded. Who knew? Maybe he was less at ease than he let on.

Heinz discovered that he _really_ wanted to find out.


End file.
